Users hanging on to XP will get their final Service Pack -- including a security upgrade -- in mere days.

Related Articles

As predicted last week, Microsoft announced Monday that Windows XP Service
Pack 3 (SP3) has been released to manufacturing (RTM) and is available to OEMs
and enterprise customers.

Meanwhile, downloads of XP SP3 will begin next Tuesday on April 29, also as
expected.

Chris Keroack, release manager for XP SP3 in the Windows Serviceability
group, confirmed the news on the SP3 forum on Microsoft's TechNet site.

The predictions last week were made by Windows community site Neowin,
which claimed to have gotten hold of a genuine copy of SP3's schedule.

That document proved to be dead-on for both April 21, the RTM date, and April
29 -- the date that Keroack has confirmed Windows Update and the Microsoft
Download Center would begin offering SP3 for download.

One date remains in question, however. Keroack's statement points to XP SP3's
release to home users via Automatic Updates in "early summer" -- technically
June 21 or later -- while Neowin has said its document has the date pegged at
June 10.

Many users -- particularly those with older systems that they don't feel
compelled to upgrade or replace -- have been waiting impatiently for SP3 as it
wound its way through the development and testing process.

In fact, continued demand for XP was behind Microsoft's decision in September
to extend its commercial availability by five months
until June 2008.

Like most service packs, SP3 provides a convenient vehicle to roll up all of
the bug patches delivered since the last service pack, XP SP2, which shipped in
August
2004.

It also adds one important new feature. SP3 provides support for Network
Access Protection -- a technology for quarantining untrusted PCs from the
network. The technology also comes in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.